> "...a society that has produced its own identity historically by
> dispossessing
> others now finds itself subject to fears, and sometimes enjoyable
> fantasies, of displacement."
....
here's a question then for butler, lacan, etc reading. is this 'thing' that 'we' are afraid 'they' will steal for 'us' something - as in, a particular thing, with partiular and recognisable content (say, land, as in the example above), or is it enjoyment, or is it no thing (void), or is it a complex of all these? butler would - as i read her thus far - go for the performative reading, the emptiness of the thing, which nonetheless cannot be declared empty without engaing in its performance. (is that right?) zizek would go for the enjoyment, the 'our way of life', the kernel which resists sheer performativity. (is that how others read him?) myself, i'm still thinking this one through. and whilst i can sit back and know - according to a marxian rationalism - what is actually going on, that does not make it go away, that does not make this particular fantasy disappear as a constitutive moment of australian politics.
angela -----------
This is fascinating. In the US, the Right are afraid that the nebulous, other-than-lily-white, are stealing, taking over, possessing, 'moving-into-the-neighborhood, in any case dispossessing, and replacing, the white.
While I ground away over the details of a race anxiety, I realized that racism is more of a metaphor, that of course can always be manifested pure and simple, but also a metaphoric representation of more than race. I could remain just within the boundaries of racism and make what is going here, make sense. But race (meaning white race), is the 'color' representation of a way of life, a manner, a world view, a moral world (of duplicity, imo), a total gestalt. So white is all of that and not-white is none of that, or threatens all of that, a priori--therefore the characterization in an American lexicon as racism. It remains always within racism since the rest of the earth, outside the isolated enclaves of lily-white is very far removed from any life related to that enclave--the middle, upper-middle, semi-urban, semi-rural, dreamland.
So, here, the 'thing' to be taken is represented in mass culture and media--which the rest of the world would recognize as 'typically american.' That's what is threatened. The fact that Clinton represents a mild alternative to this 'thing' is his crime--as seen from the narrow perspective of the Right. But that mild alternative, takes the form of a race anxiety.
Now, I might consider this dreamland a void, limbo, since I spent part of my youth there and thought of it as death, but the whitewing doesn't--they consider it life. And the rightwing also considers it land, as in a neighborhood to keep possession of. But also government, the public sphere of institutions:local government, civil service (now often minority in the rank and file), schools, certainly prisons, courts, and other public bodies. Hence the generalization of a gestalt of possessions. Only the upper reaches of business, and privately owned businesses are immune, are still 'in the possession' of the 'typically american', aka white race. Thus the entire thrust of 'privatization' of publicly held bodies, is brought into the equation and became the whitewing mantra. The tax revolt of the late seventies through the eighties, here, was motivated by race anxiety, so money, the ultimate possession must be withdrawn from what is publicly held, because the horror, the other, the dark, the non-lily-white, the not-typically american, was in fact in the process of dispossessing.
There are of course multiple threats that constitute this master race, the lily-whiteness of it all, and woman is not quite part of it, because woman is other, lower, somehow sullied in the mire of flesh, of pussy and child birth, materiality and of course can and is to be possessed. But I haven't gotten that far--gotten far enough into analyzing this master race ugliness and its inner workings. Does Butler develop any of this?
Chuck Grimes